Chapter 54

My main job while getting the hog's hash settled turned out to be keeping the new smoke house in operation, or more nearly, getting it into operation. After it was finished I spent the rest of the day building hickory fires and hanging meat. As the day wore on two of Goondoe's men came to help me and when a third one showed up I took the hint and called for Keeta to come and help me by translating while I gave instructions.

After two days all three of the men knew everything I did about smoking meat the smoke house way, and since Rose did a little teaching among the men's wives they knew more than I did when I finally decided I'd done all I could. What the hell, I took a day off, or tried to, until I realized we weren't going to be having an East Texas winter here and now.

When the snow started it wouldn't put down three or four inches and then be done for the year like I was accustomed to. I needed to have something to cut with my sawmill and if I didn't get it down and inside pretty fast I wasn't going to be able to cut up shit.

There were already several men who'd seen me use the chainsaw before and no doubt if I asked for volunteers I could get plenty. I wasn't going to let things go so fast though. Felling a tree is a dangerous proposition every single time.

After you learn a little about it you soon find out how much you can never know about what is going to happen. Eighty percent of the time you look a tree over, make your best guess, start cutting, and everything goes along fine. It's the other twenty percent of the time where things can go wrong. The biggest problem is you never know which percentage you're putting the saw to at the time.

Everything can look fine and then go to shit after you've gone too far to make any difference by stopping. The most important part of the whole deal is knowing which exit to take when something does go wrong.

I fully intended to teach at least three men how to fell trees, but it was going to take time and they were going to watch me do a lot of it first. At least we'd be starting with smaller trees here and working our way back to larger ones.

Felling the trees isn't the whole shebang either. We had to cut them into lengths we could work with on our carriage, we had to limb them, and most difficult of all we'd have to debark them. Everything about it was going to be work, but the first thing was getting some of them on the ground.

Since we'd basically be clear cutting the first few hundred yards of shelf I started with the smallest first. Nothing with less than a twelve-inch diameter would be useful for lumber anyway, so the first few days was like cutting firewood and since firewood would be needed badly we concentrated on that job.

Of course they were all familiar with gathering firewood their way and with modern things I supplied they could do a good job of cutting up and stacking small wood. Splitting larger trees wasn't part of their repertoire.

After I gave a short demonstration of the use and delights of the crosscut hand saw, the splitting wedge, sledgehammer, and the wood grenade they were delighted. The main problem after the show was every man and woman who saw the it wanted to try things out at once.

This was not really a problem. Our giant skidder was a little bit of overkill for dragging the smaller trees we were cutting out so we could get at 'em, but we had plenty of helpers for attaching chokers and pulling the winch line. Our job was only operating things that could move without muscle power and giving instructions.

The noises of all the chopping and sawing soon had everyone from the cave out to take a look at the doings. Catla even brought Chiqa and Kita out to see what was happening, but she had to keep a close eye on Kita since she wanted to help too.

When I was a young boy I'd cut and split a lot of firewood myself just like most of my friends. One thing I'd never seen though was so many people wanting to get in on the deal. Of course I'd never been around people who basically lived outside during the winter either. None of us actually lived outside now, but it didn't mean a cave couldn't be cold during the winter and the idea of having plenty of firewood must have been attractive.

There was also the fact this was a hell of a lot easier way to do things than they'd had before. Chainsaws and steel axes were orders of magnitude better than sharp rocks tied to sticks.

Once they were on the job none of them seemed to want to stop either. The women wandered off to take care of cooking and other things when they weren't in line for a turn with some tool or the other, but almost all the men wanted to keep at things. George and I had to make them stop to go eat lunch.

Afternoon was more of the same, but we were soon done with the smaller trees we were going to clear-cut. I knocked off felling for the rest of the day and decided we'd finish up the firewood before starting any serious logging.

Finishing up wasn't a problem though. There were twice as many than needed every time George snaked a log within their reach. I worried someone was going to cut someone else as they kept swarming the new arrivals and removing limbs in a sort of mass attack. There were axes and hatchets flying everywhere, but no one got cut somehow. Hell, they even cut up the small limbs.

We had one hellacious stack of firewood outside the cave's door and there were several inside too. Fires and freestanding heaters were scattered around inside the cave near the sleeping and cooking areas and there was a big stack of firewood near each of them too. As I was sitting at the table eating lunch on the second day of the firewood project I thought of something we had to try next year and I told Rose about it so she could help me remember.

"We need to start making bricks Rose."

"I didn't know we could."